As a consultant the changes in the economy, some people tried to put the fear into consultants by saying they might not be kept if the market continues to drop. The statement by Google today showed that they can still be a company that takes care with their staff, with stories in the press about companies like Mac Bank, holding lavish christmas parties and then sacking 1000 staff. It is refreshing to see a letter posted on the company blogs, rather than trying to hide the fact that the economy has changed.
Official Google Blog: Changes to recruiting
Jan 19, 2009
Jan 17, 2009
Official Google Blog: Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program
Official Google Blog: Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program
Google is pushing ahead with its plans to move more business onto its Google Apps platform, my only concern is of the 50 pilot companies who have signed up now have their business model shaken up. These pilot companies and anyone else who signs up have their entire business model and details about their costs splashed across the net.
Im in favour of more companies promoting and supporting Google Apps, but i would have thought that Google would be a little more discreet about keeping its partners profit margins confidential.
Google is pushing ahead with its plans to move more business onto its Google Apps platform, my only concern is of the 50 pilot companies who have signed up now have their business model shaken up. These pilot companies and anyone else who signs up have their entire business model and details about their costs splashed across the net.
Im in favour of more companies promoting and supporting Google Apps, but i would have thought that Google would be a little more discreet about keeping its partners profit margins confidential.
Jan 16, 2009
Google Apps limitations
This site had an image of 1 billion dollars and have registered around 261 Diggs with the image hosted on http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/ but the issue was that Google Sites was displaying this text.
"We are sorry, but this site has exceeded its bandwidth limit at this time. Please try again later. For more information, see Google Sites help."
This shows the issues with SaaS and how any issues or errors are very visible and often not explained correctly. It is likely that they are using the free Google Apps suite, but a link such as why not upgrade to Google Apps Premier Edition and never see this error again...
The worry is that this Digg stories combined with their recent push into Promoting their Google Apps Premier Edition to their Reseller partners can produce distrust for their products. SaaS news did a short article on the renewed push by Google to beat IBM, Yahoo & Microsoft in the online market.
With more than 1 million business customers using Google Apps, Google decides it's time to broaden its cloud computing ecosystem by letting other businesses resell its Google Apps Premier Edition suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Now vendors will be able to resell GAPE for $40 per user, a 20 percent discount from Google's $50 per-user, per-year fee. GAPE includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and other apps.
A clarification, im using Google Apps Premier Edition and its one of the best SaaS solutions that I found in the market, its worth the $50/year just for the enterprise Gmail featured with 99.99% SLA on uptime.
"We are sorry, but this site has exceeded its bandwidth limit at this time. Please try again later. For more information, see Google Sites help."
This shows the issues with SaaS and how any issues or errors are very visible and often not explained correctly. It is likely that they are using the free Google Apps suite, but a link such as why not upgrade to Google Apps Premier Edition and never see this error again...
The worry is that this Digg stories combined with their recent push into Promoting their Google Apps Premier Edition to their Reseller partners can produce distrust for their products. SaaS news did a short article on the renewed push by Google to beat IBM, Yahoo & Microsoft in the online market.
With more than 1 million business customers using Google Apps, Google decides it's time to broaden its cloud computing ecosystem by letting other businesses resell its Google Apps Premier Edition suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Now vendors will be able to resell GAPE for $40 per user, a 20 percent discount from Google's $50 per-user, per-year fee. GAPE includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and other apps.
A clarification, im using Google Apps Premier Edition and its one of the best SaaS solutions that I found in the market, its worth the $50/year just for the enterprise Gmail featured with 99.99% SLA on uptime.
Jan 6, 2009
Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?
What’s the effect when you submit a Sitemap on the site. Read the original article on SEOmoz.
My view is that if you have a very active blog, with 2-5 new articles posted each monday every week, every month..., google bot's seem to understand this pattern and will often reward you with regular visits. My clients blog recently set a personal record with its spiders hitting around 55 seconds after a post, and would come back and trawl related old articles in the following days.
The interesting thing about this spider hit that was that the blog wasnt a massive traffic magnet for the client, but seem to always have consistent slow growth in visitors. Any visitor spikes often matched these crazy monday posts, but if you posted 5 articles or 3 articles they had around the same % growth against the average daily visits.
The blog was setup with wordpress.org, installed on the server and the Google sitemap XML plugin was installed. It is a very important point, that if you have proper sitemaps setup, google loves you and can reward your blog with visitors.
Other ideas to help your blog are to tweak elements of the article once it has been trawled by the spider, to get a new hit, change the title, maybe add a relevant image or two and a tweak a few paragraphs. And see how the spider responds to the update, why do you think news websites put out basic outline and slowly provide updates as the story progresses they understand they people/spiders will return and may even pickup old articles and post them to the frontpage of Google News....
Dec 7, 2008
Bruce Clay talks about Client Understanding SEM
BruceClay wrote a great article about how you know when your client gets SEM, read the original post here.
I had a break through with a painful client recently, he asked for some assistance with a simple matter.
I offered several suggestions about making sure that their current ad on another site was not suitable, it was changed by the next day. They had some questions about adspend, and this was approved by the end of the day.
I was pleased that everytime i offered a few suggestions, these were implemented and the client came back with more relevant questions. There has been a decent uplift or organic traffic since we helped the client with these areas and their online sales have also jumped.
When a client helps you move forward in your understanding of their online business, its a great feeling. They often also feel more empowered and you get a happy client who won't leave on price because they understand that you want their business to succeed and not just the monthly invoice.
I had a break through with a painful client recently, he asked for some assistance with a simple matter.
I offered several suggestions about making sure that their current ad on another site was not suitable, it was changed by the next day. They had some questions about adspend, and this was approved by the end of the day.
I was pleased that everytime i offered a few suggestions, these were implemented and the client came back with more relevant questions. There has been a decent uplift or organic traffic since we helped the client with these areas and their online sales have also jumped.
When a client helps you move forward in your understanding of their online business, its a great feeling. They often also feel more empowered and you get a happy client who won't leave on price because they understand that you want their business to succeed and not just the monthly invoice.
Who can speel weel?
Mispelt keywords can generate a fair wack of traffic for most sites, and if you examine your analytics you will discover that a majority of your customers cant spell your company name or product names... often many fail to use the space bar between words because they understand that google will self correct them....
there is another element of typo seo when you targeting the US market and having to swap "s" for "z" in words....
great article linked below on the topic, nice to see words of warning, use this with a small serve and only in moderation as google will offer suggested correct spelling.
another great moment is when your typo domain outranks your correctly spelt domain....
SE Guide
there is another element of typo seo when you targeting the US market and having to swap "s" for "z" in words....
great article linked below on the topic, nice to see words of warning, use this with a small serve and only in moderation as google will offer suggested correct spelling.
another great moment is when your typo domain outranks your correctly spelt domain....
SE Guide
Google's Ads Per Keyword Output In High Gear
Google admit that they dont show as many ads as they possibly could for many search terms, i think this might be a more in the right direction. A word of caution if you have permission to use trademarked terms, these phrases only usually show 1-2 ads, and it can prove very expensive just to be shown.
More ads are great, but there are some competitive terms that have 80+ ads shown which is just annoying if a majority of your competitors are using bid management software such as http://www.clickable.com/ and you are still using the proven manual methods... you up your bid and they automatically do, this kind of round robin can break your campaign if you are just running it on the concept that #1 means more leads and better CTR....
WebProNews
More ads are great, but there are some competitive terms that have 80+ ads shown which is just annoying if a majority of your competitors are using bid management software such as http://www.clickable.com/ and you are still using the proven manual methods... you up your bid and they automatically do, this kind of round robin can break your campaign if you are just running it on the concept that #1 means more leads and better CTR....
WebProNews
WSJ Editor Doesn't Get Internet Advertising
im sorry but ive got into a bad habit, unless im travelling, i just click on the google toolbar icon to bring up current news stories...
i know there has been some issues around old stories appearing and google news having a delay, but its not influenced by corporate digg accounts... its much easier to just use google news, click through and once you are on their site view some related articles.
if the website requires login, just go back and there is usually another similar article that you can view free!
i love www.wsj.com, and www.iht.com, but there is a change, people want something now, if it is quick, and displays ads around the outside, most people dont mind.
i agree that wsj doesnt get online!
WebProNews
i know there has been some issues around old stories appearing and google news having a delay, but its not influenced by corporate digg accounts... its much easier to just use google news, click through and once you are on their site view some related articles.
if the website requires login, just go back and there is usually another similar article that you can view free!
i love www.wsj.com, and www.iht.com, but there is a change, people want something now, if it is quick, and displays ads around the outside, most people dont mind.
i agree that wsj doesnt get online!
WebProNews
Nov 22, 2008
Will personalised & behavior-based search to kill ranking... and SEO?
yes, i believe there will be a radical change around how seo is performed. The biggest change from google is the recent Google SearchWiki.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html
This tool has the potential to increase your returning visitors, because if they already like your site but dont bookmark it and always find it by search, that is great. But this same behaviour will may make it hard for newer sites to get to the top of their personalisation lists, if the user is making good use of the remove site for travel operators and you launch a brand new travel site, you may find that you never make it into their list because they automatically remove all but their favourite sites.
From Yahoo camp there is Glue which offers a more global behaviour based search for all visitors. http://glue.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Glue search results, are biased towards informational searches and change based on business or interest based search, but dont seem to be influenced by geographic location at this stage.
I think there is room for a focus around behavioural based search, but it will require a lot more resources and research than previous campaigns have required.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html
This tool has the potential to increase your returning visitors, because if they already like your site but dont bookmark it and always find it by search, that is great. But this same behaviour will may make it hard for newer sites to get to the top of their personalisation lists, if the user is making good use of the remove site for travel operators and you launch a brand new travel site, you may find that you never make it into their list because they automatically remove all but their favourite sites.
From Yahoo camp there is Glue which offers a more global behaviour based search for all visitors. http://glue.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Glue search results, are biased towards informational searches and change based on business or interest based search, but dont seem to be influenced by geographic location at this stage.
I think there is room for a focus around behavioural based search, but it will require a lot more resources and research than previous campaigns have required.
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